Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/101

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Loyalty

this virtue on constant tap, to be applied on instruction to this or that relationship, is not merely irrational to us: it is beyond the apprehension of our intelligence.

We can understand love born of a natural relationship. But the quality of love differs essentially from the quality of loyalty. Loyalty is demanded as an independent quality, as a thing in itself; it is cultivated (love cannot be "cultivated"); it is stimulated and forced. It is not demanded, essentially, that you love: it is demanded that you be loyal.

Very often, indeed, loyalty is demanded where a demand for love would be too obviously ludicrous. For the application of loyalty is to you as seemly in the case of an association of shoe salesmen as in the case of country itself.

It is expected, in your world, that a man should be loyal to his country, to his province, to his city, to his section of the city, to his college, to his club, to his business associations, to his fraternity, to every chance group into which events may bring him. In the first

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